Why did humans take over the world while our closest relatives, the
Neanderthals had
Two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, Europe and western Asia were
Anthropologists once saw Neanderthals as
Neanderthals
They gathered
Neanderthals also had a sense of beauty, making beads and
Then there’s the fact Homo sapiens and Neanderthals
The hunter-gatherer society
It may be that the key differences were less at the individual level than at the societal level. It’s impossible to understand humans in isolation, any more than you can understand a honeybee without considering its colony. We prize our individuality, but our survival is tied to larger social groups, like a bee’s fate depends on the colony’s survival.
Modern hunter-gatherers provide our best guess at how early humans and Neanderthals lived. People like the Namibia’s
These tribes lack hierachical structures, but they’re linked by shared language and religion, marriages, kinships and friendships. Neanderthal societies may have been similar but with one crucial difference: smaller social groups.
Tight-knit tribes
What points to this is evidence that Neanderthals had
In small populations, genes are easily lost. If one person in ten carries a gene for curly hair, then in a ten-person band, one death could remove the gene from the population. In a band of fifty, five people would carry the gene – multiple backup copies. So over time, small groups tend to lose genetic variation, ending up with fewer genes.
In 2022, DNA was recovered from
Because we inherit two sets of chromosomes – one from our mother, one from our father – we carry two copies of each gene. Often, we have two different versions of a gene. You might get a gene for blue eyes from your mother, and one for brown eyes from your father.
But the Altai Neanderthals often had one version of each gene. As the study reports, that low diversity suggests they lived in small bands – probably averaging just 20 people.
It’s possible Neanderthal anatomy favoured small groups. Being robust and muscular, Neanderthals were heavier than us. So each Neanderthal needed more food, meaning the
And Neanderthals may have mainly
Group size matters
If humans lived in bigger groups than Neanderthals it could have given us advantages.
Neanderthals, strong and skilled with
But even if Neanderthals and humans were equally dangerous in battle, if humans also had a numeric advantage they could bring more fighters and absorb more losses.
Big societies have other, subtler advantages. Larger bands have more brains. More brains to solve problems, remember lore about animals and plants, and techniques for crafting tools and sewing clothing. Just as big groups have higher genetic diversity, they’ll have higher diversity of ideas.
And more people means more connections. Network connections increase exponentially with network size, following
Information flows through these connections: news about people and movements of animals; toolmaking techniques; and words, songs and myths. Plus the group’s behaviour becomes increasingly complex.
Consider ants. Individually, ants aren’t smart. But interactions between millions of ants lets colonies make elaborate nests, forage for food and kill animals many times an ant’s size. Likewise, human groups do things no one person can – design buildings and cars, write elaborate computer programmes, fight wars, run companies and countries.
Humans aren’t unique in having big brains (whales and elephants have these) or in having huge social groups (zebras and wildebeest form huge herds). But we’re unique in combining them.
To
It may be then that an ability to build large social structures gave Homo sapiens the edge, against nature, and other hominin species.
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